I would add something:
I'm one of the devs of the bzflag.
I recently added SDL to the game, as the game is multiplatform.
Another the dev used to play with direct-color 8 bit, as it was
supported on the game before SDL adding.
Analyzing the problem we found that SDL_pixel.c need to be patched with
some lines of code, not handling our particular configuration.
We are now releasing really soon, and we would like those patch, or
something else that fixes it, to be applied, in a way that we could in
the future, eventually discard the old files.
Thanks